It is, of course, long COVID. Last Friday, this appeared on the Twitterz:

The more often you get COVID, the higher your risk of complications.

So now that most people believe the pandemic is over–and so we must befree and clear–the CDC is telling people to avoid getting (re)infected. I don’t think we’ll return to 25,000 dead per week in the U.S., but long COVID is a serious issue that affects a non-trivial number of those who are infected, even if they are vaccinated and boosted (though that does lower the chances of contracting long COVID). And I have a bad feeling that September and October are going to be the start of something bad*.

It goes without saying that wearing KN95 or N95 masks also lessens the chance you’ll get COVID (and thus the “risk of complications”), but the Biden Administration probably would nuke Atlanta if the CDC proposed that, so we’ll have to take what we can get.

*I think the combination of a couple of new variants out there, waning immunity from boosters, and the massive change in travel patterns associated with back-to-school (including college) could make for a start of something really bad in September and October. It doesn’t help that the wastewater data from multiple locations is showing significant increases over the last three or four weeks.